Your Wreck Hour: A First Week Map

A Harvest Kernel working session

Your Wreck Hour: A First Week Map

Twenty minutes. You do it by hand. You finish holding a written week you can follow on Monday morning, and one hour on it that belongs to you on purpose.

Before you start

Open your class schedule in another tab. You need the real times, not the ones you remember. Nothing here is saved or sent anywhere. When you are done, the copy button at the bottom hands you the whole thing as text you can paste into your notes app, your calendar, or a message to yourself.

Work top to bottom. Each phase unlocks the next one for a reason.

0 of 15 filled in

Phase one . Seed

What is fixed

Write your class times exactly as they are. Day, start, end, and where. If you have to look it up, look it up. Guessing here is what makes the rest of the map wrong.

Class 1
Class 2
Class 3
Class 4, and any others on one line

Phase two . Sprout

What is true but never gets scheduled

This is the part that makes a week real instead of tidy. None of it appears on a registration screen and all of it happens anyway.

Travel. How long does it take you to get to campus, and to get between your two furthest apart classes
Work, practice, family, anything with a fixed time somebody else set
Eating. When do you actually eat on a class day
Sleep. What time do you actually fall asleep, and what time do you have to be up

Phase three . Grow

Find the gap and give it a job

Look at what you just wrote and find the space between two classes that are not back to back. That is the gap. It is not free time. It is the most contested hour on your week and right now nobody owns it.

Where is your biggest gap, and how long is it
Multiply it out. Gap hours in one week, times the number of weeks in your term
Which class is hardest for you, and it is not about the material. Which one meets when you are worst
Honest question. What is getting your best hours right now, and what is getting your leftovers

Phase four . Harvest

Name your wreck hour

One hour. Not a study plan, not a system, one hour with a name on it. This is the hour that carries the reading for your hardest class, placed somewhere you are actually functional. Protect it and it carries you. Leave it unassigned and it is the hour that quietly wrecks the semester around week six.

My wreck hour is
In it, I do exactly this one thing
The thing most likely to steal it, and what I will say when it does

One honest thing before you go

You just built week one. It is real and it will work.

In about ten days it will also be wrong. Four syllabi will land, each one written as though it is the only class you take, and somewhere in there are three things due in the same October week that nobody has stacked together yet. Every time a date moves, this map is quietly wrong in a few places and you are back here with a pen.

That is the point where you either redraw it by hand every week, or you stop doing it by hand. Student Desk takes the messy version of your week and routes it, and it is on the free plan, which costs nothing and is not a trial. Draw this one first though. You will read your own week better for having done it once with a pen.

Open Student Desk on the free plan

Take your week with you

This page does not save anything. Copy your finished week and paste it somewhere you will actually see it on Monday morning.

Copy my first week map